The video features the former Disney star writhing around in skimpy underwear between white bed sheets, rubbing her body, squeezing her breasts and biting her lips suggestively, before slipping her hand into her knickers – all while filming herself.

It’s a scene we’re all familiar with: the family gathered for Christmas, eating a delicious meal, swapping jokes pulled from crackers, children enthusiastically unwrapping presents, singing carols or listening to the Queen’s speech. And perhaps later, relaxing on the sofa as James Stewart discovers the true meaning of family in It’s a Wonderful Life.

Maybe your loved ones prefer The Wizard of Oz, Home Alone or another festive favourite. But whatever your choice, there’s no denying that entertainment – the films we can quote the lines from, the Christmas specials we cringe at and the seasonal CDs we have on in the background – has been a part of many Christmases past.

Nowadays, families may be laughing at Christmas videos on YouTube, tweeting, watching specials on a tablet or sitting plugged into an iPod listening to music that sounds distinctively non-Christmassy. Or perhaps they will still be watching a Christmas film, keeping up the tradition.

The question is: will they be watching it legally? Will they have gone to one of the growing list of legal download sites that offer recent releases, such as Man of Steel, for under £4 each, or will they decide that, after buying generous Christmas gifts, they can’t spare a few pounds to ensure that at Christmas in the future there will still be songs, films and books to enjoy?

Charles Dickens had a name for the type of person who could not look beyond their own narrow interests to see the impact of their parsimony – Scrooge – but of course we know that, because enough of Dickens’ readers recognised that the arts needed to pay. In fact, Dickens was an early champion of international copyright law, making himself hugely unpopular on an 1842 tour of America after he called for Congress to recognise the copyright of British authors: “Firstly because it is justice; secondly, because without it you can never have, and keep, a literature of your own.” It took until 1891 for Congress to act – and today it seems surprising that international copyright was ever in doubt.

These days too many of us – of all ages – seem to think that the theft of creative content is a victimless crime, taking profit from big businesses that have plenty to go around. Those who run sites that host copyright-infringing content think they have the right to do so, that their theft is justified – no matter that 345m tracks were illegally downloaded in only the first six months of last year, or that more than a third of all films viewed online in the UK infringe copyright. We think that the industry bigwigs will enjoy one less glass of champagne, or have to fly economy rather than first-class to the Caribbean. Those circulating copyrighted content can be as Scrooge-like as they please, because there’s no Tiny Tim to think of.

Except that there is. The creative industry in this country is no Tiny Tim – it is, in fact, one of the UK’s biggest success stories, with 1.5m jobs dependent on it – but from sound engineers to camera crews, and from printworkers to retail shop assistants, this industry is vital to the future of our economy. It creates jobs, not just at big record companies and studios, but at thousands of small, independent companies, and for thousands of singers, dancers, actors and writers, who are finding it ever more difficult to survive in an industry that is losing £500m a year to copyright infringement.

Whatever our taste, we all surely benefit from the global creative industry, which allows us to choose the type of entertainment we prefer, whether Breaking Bad, Beyoncé or Downton Abbey. Lionel Guyett, an actor in Downton Abbey, is one of a host of industry figures to have backed the Creative Coalition Campaign‘s petition urging politicians to support measures to tackle the theft of creative content online. So have I – and so have Arlene Phillips, Tim Piggot-Smith and hundreds of others working in all corners of the entertainment industry. Why? Because we are proud of Britain’s rich creative history, from Shakespeare and Dickens to Downton, and we are fearful for its future.

The CCC, a partnership between creative businesses and unions, believes it is time for our representatives to stand up for creators and workers by making a commitment to support the fight against illegal downloading and streaming. With only one more Christmas before the general election, the CCC has launched a new petition calling for all parties to make this a manifesto priority in 2015.

At Christmases past and present, we have laughed, cried and cheered for much-loved characters created by artists who dreamed of making it in the creative industry and got there. We have smiled to see George Bailey‘s luck change and his Life become Wonderful, and we have watched Macaulay Culkin see off the baddies with any number of ingenious schemes. We have listened to recordings of White Christmas and Fairytale of New York, or sat down with a book when we just needed a bit of peace. It’s time to make sure that, at Christmas in the future, we can do the same.

As the year draws to a close, EFF is looking back at the major trends influencing digital rights in 2013 and discussing where we are in the fight for free expression, innovation, fair use, and privacy. Click here to read other blog posts in this series.

We’ve been saying for years that copyright law is broken. 2013 saw the beginning of what could be a meaningful effort to fix it – if Internet users pay attention and stay involved.

Back in March, Register of Copyrights Maria Pallante issued a public call to Congress to get going on what she called the “Next Great Copyright Act.” As she noted, our current Copyright Act was passed over 40 years ago, and was already outdated then. And so begins what is likely to be a long and tortuous process. House Judiciary Chair Bob Goodlatte has held a series of hearings on copyright policy, with several more set for the coming year. The Internet Policy Task Force issued a “green paper” identifying particularly thorny issues (such as whether the first sale doctrine applies to ebooks as well as physical books), inviting public comment and beginning a “multi-stakeholder dialogue” about those issues. That dialogue will continue in 2014.

We’ll continue to watch this process closely, and participate as well. It would be great to see Congress restore some sanity to our rules on copyright penalties, so that innovators don’t have to risk crushing liability if they guess wrong about whether their new service or technology infringes copyright. We’d also love to Congress clarify that the first sale doctrine applies equally to digital goods – “you bought it, you own it” should be the rule, not the exception, whether the thing purchased is a CD or an mp3. And while they are at it, our legislators should repeal the anti-circumvention law that has caused no end of collateral damage, with little corresponding benefit.

We have other ideas, of course, which we will be sharing in the coming year. And we will need your help to make them a reality. But the key goal is this: Policymakers must understand that the people they most need to consult on copyright and innovation are the users of the Internet—the millions of people who have found their voice due, in part, to the emergence of technologies and platforms that allow them to speak to a larger audience than ever before. They need to talk to independent creators, innovators, and Internet users who are going to feel the real effects of an overly aggressive legal regime, not to mention the technologists who actually understand the collateral damage that can result when new rules may impact fundamental Internet architecture. They must bring in policy and industry analysts who are developing real evidence based on hard data, not spin. Last, but not least, the process must be transparent, democratic, and accessible.

Copyright policy is too important to leave to a few powerful interests that can afford to buy a seat at the table. To claim spaces for the rest of us, we need to let policymakers know, early and often, that we are paying attention and will stop any agenda that does not hew to copyright’spurpose: to fuel innovation and creative expression. We’ll be giving you tools to do that. Please watch this space and stay involved.

This article is part of our 2013 Year in Review series; read other articles about the fight for digital rights in 2013.

The multi-platinum selling singer took to Twitter to break the news to his 47 million followers on Christmas Eve, in a tweet that said: “My beloved beliebers I’m officially retiring.”

His 4am tweets then continued with the contradictory statement that he would be here “forever”. He wrote: “The media talks a lot about me. They make a up a lot of lies and want me to fail but I’m never leaving you, being a belieber is a lifestyle… Be kind loving [sic] to each other, forgive each other as god forgave us through Christ Merry Christmas IM HERE FOREVER”.

He first suggested he would be quitting the industry during an interview with Power 106 FM, where he told host Kurt Alexander in Los Angeles: “Um, I’m actually retiring man”. He added: “I want to grow as an artist, and I’m taking a step out, I want my music to mature.”

However, his manager Scooter Braun later dismissed the singer’s remarks and confirmed that he will not be retiring after all. “Next year he’s taking a break just to make music and relax, take some time for himself for the first time since he was 12,” Braun told ITN at the premiere for his new movie Believe.

The Twittersphere exploded with the news as Bieber’s panic-stricken fanbase – the dedicated ‘Beliebers’ -posted frantic messages of shock, worry and teenage heartbreak.

Bieber hit international stardom when he was scouted through YouTube videos in 2007.

The multi-platinum selling singer took to Twitter to break the news to his 47 million followers on Christmas Eve, in a tweet that said: “My beloved beliebers I’m officially retiring.”

His 4am tweets then continued with the contradictory statement that he would be here “forever”. He wrote: “The media talks a lot about me. They make a up a lot of lies and want me to fail but I’m never leaving you, being a belieber is a lifestyle… Be kind loving [sic] to each other, forgive each other as god forgave us through Christ Merry Christmas IM HERE FOREVER”.

He first suggested he would be quitting the industry during an interview with Power 106 FM, where he told host Kurt Alexander in Los Angeles: “Um, I’m actually retiring man”. He added: “I want to grow as an artist, and I’m taking a step out, I want my music to mature.”

However, his manager Scooter Braun later dismissed the singer’s remarks and confirmed that he will not be retiring after all. “Next year he’s taking a break just to make music and relax, take some time for himself for the first time since he was 12,” Braun told ITN at the premiere for his new movie Believe.

The Twittersphere exploded with the news as Bieber’s panic-stricken fanbase – the dedicated ‘Beliebers’ -posted frantic messages of shock, worry and teenage heartbreak.

Bieber hit international stardom when he was scouted through YouTube videos in 2007.

Just last week, Bieber had told a Los Angeles radio station he planned to quit. “After the new album, I’m actually retiring, man. I’m retiring,” he told Power 106 on December 17. However, he then suggested that was not, in fact, the case. “I want to grow as an artist, and I’m taking a step out, I want my music to mature,” he added.

If south and central Chennai hog the kutcheries and the sabhas, north Chennai too has its own celebration of the Margazhi season, though in a much smaller way.

Every Margazhi, despite the cold mornings, a large audience gathers to listen to Tamizh Isai at the Sri Kothandaramar temple on Perambalu Street in Old Washermenpet. The Margazhi Deiva Tamizh Vizha is in its 26th year, and is being organised thanks to contributions from kind hearts that support music.

R. Mohan Kumar, a resident of Tiruvottiyur, who is at the temple every day at 5.30 a.m. to listen to discourses and the concert of the day, says it is nice to have concerts nearer home. “Earlier, I have attended a few free concerts in sabhas in Mylapore. But I am more comfortable here as I enjoy the music in the mornings and then go for work,” he said.

Margazhi Deiva Thamizh Vizha organisers, S. Mahalingam, Ma. Ki. Ramanan and S. Yugarajan said they were continuing the work of the Irai Pani Anbargal that had been conducting street bhajans for over 45 years now.

“Our aim is to encourage Tamil isai only. The musicians sing for free. We get at least 200 listeners every day,” said Mr. Ramanan. Mr. Yugarajan said that though north Madras was once home to Carnatic music, the area had lost its sheen over the years. However, organising Carnatic music festivals here had helped residents slowly learn to appreciate classical music, he said.

The Tamil Isai Sangam is a leader of sorts in propagating Pann isai (Tamil music) in the city. In its 71st year now, the Sangam was started by Sri Annamalai Chettiyar, R.K. Shanmugan Chettiyar, Kalki and Rajaji.

“Artistes are welcome only to sing Tamil songs. Even Carnatic vocalist K.J. Yesudas, who has been performing at our Sangam for 35 years now, sings only in Tamil,” said a representative of the Sangam. Yesudas will perform for the Sangam on December 28 at the Raja Annamalai Mandram in Esplanade.

Other organisations in north Chennai like the Perambur Sangeetha Sabha (PSS) in Perambur, Sri Sai Vivekananda in Kodungaiyur and Padma Sarangapani Cultural Academy (PSCA) in Villivakkam, support Carnatic music in their own way.

The PSCA had been organising music festivals for 10 years, but stopped after they found that rasikas preferred sabhas in south Chennai. PSCA secretary V. Jayakrishnan said they were unable to continue despite providing transport to the rasikas, as the response to their music festival was not good.

Kalyana Varadan of the PSS said the sabha was established in 1931 and has been organising music programmes every month, except during the kutchery season.

According to historian V. Sriram, the city’s first sabha, the Madras Jubilee Gayan Samaj, was begun in 1887 at Pachaiyappa’s Hall on NSC Bose Road. There were several other sabhas too, including the Muthialpet Sabha and the Thondai Mandalam Sabha, which was the first to ticket concerts in the late 1880s, and the Perambur Venkatesa Gunamritha Abhivarshini Sabha, which was the founder of the Madras Labour Union in 1918-19.

There’s hardly an institution more hoary and suspect than the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. A barely-veiled excuse to further lionize and celebrate the past, the Hall of Fame to this point has mostly existed to further cement prevailing notions about What’s Important in Popular Music. To attach any measure of importance to it feels ridiculous — induction or exclusion indicates neither artistic merit nor lack thereof. It’s a diverting yearly sideshow, but has the actual cultural weight of, say, a Video Music Award.

Nevertheless, it’s been interesting to watch what’s happened as the Rock Hall’s standards for admission — artists become eligible for inclusion 25 years after their record — has forced voters to eventually move past the same predictable parade of classic rockers and into somewhat more interesting, less-familiar territory. Last year, Public Enemy rightly got the nod, as Laura Nyro did the year before that. And this year’s crop of inductees is led by Peter Gabriel and Nirvana, artists who are in some ways defined by their sonic curiosity and the way in which they bent the rules of pop music to fit their own designs. Occasionally, the results were hostile to their audience — Nirvana’s third studio album, In Utero, was essentially designed to do just that — but both acts approached music with a sense of curiosity and only a passing interest in convention and expectation.

This notion occurred to me again and again when it came time to compile eMusic’s 100 Best Albums of 2013. Appraising the musical landscape over the course of the last year, the albums that seemed most interesting were the ones that strayed furthest from familiar paths. A number of these were commercial successes: Justin Timberlake managed to sell two million copies of a record filled with languid, open-ended seven-and-a-half-minute R&B mini-suites and Daft Punk, one of the early pioneers of electronic music, returned in a year when that genre was at its peak with a record full of pastel-colored ’70s AM radio songs, very few of which employed synthesizers. Sometimes the subversion was slyer: country Kacey Musgraves loaded the warm, sunny country songs on her third album Same Trailer, Different Park with lyrics that cast a jaundiced eye on the genre’s time-tested tropes. “Mary, Mary quite contrary/ we get bored, so we get married,” she sings on “Merry-Go-Round,” concluding, “and just like dust, we settle in this town.” “Follow Your Arrow” is a plainspoken endorsement of gay relationships and marriage — a monumental leap forward in a genre that is often considered proudly politically retrograde. The result is one of the year’s best songs.

But there were even braver experiments were visionary artistically, even if they were met with either rejection or indifference commercially. Kanye West’s divisive Yeezus, as of this writing, remains his lowest-selling release to date, but it is arguably one of the most audacious mainstream releases in recent memory. Essentially an album-length meditation on the state of racial politics in America, West pairs the album’s grim sentiment with appropriately ugly music — scraping synthesizers, wailing, siren-like electronics, unsettling vocal samples that float in and out of frame like weird spirits. It was bracing in the best possible way, and the album’s first half contains some of West’s sharpest, angriest lyrics to date.

Unfortunately, it also contains some of his most despicably misogynistic lyrics, too; it’s fitting, then, that the album that most felt like the other half of Yeezus was the Knife’s Shaking the Habitual, which could serve as a corrective to West’s acrid sexism in addition to being a stunning work on its own (at eMusic, we named it the Best Album of 2013, one spot ahead of Yeezus). Karin Dreijer Andersson and Olof Dreijer, the personalities behind The Knife, essentially seek to reinvent music whole cloth. They spent the years preceding the album’s release immersed in the essential texts of economic theory and queer theory and feminist theory, and then thought about what it might mean to make a record based on those principles — to “play” the theories as if they were musical notes. They took familiar sounds and “queered” them, distorting them or dirtying them and generally making them unrecognizable. They took elements of popular music that typically telegraphed as aggressively male and undid them, exploring different ways of accomplishing that in each song. They dropped a 20-minute drone piece in the center of the record called “Old Dreams Waiting to Be Realized,” a meditation, according to its makers, on all of the old political theories – true democracy, classless society, economic equality — that have yet to come about. In the song, they wail in the distance like old, tortured ghosts. The album is an astonishing listen because it never stops asking questions and never stops pushing the boundaries; it constantly rethinks the way music is supposed to sound.

The future, it could be argued, belongs to artists who take these kinds of risks. As time-tested strategies around both album content and release method continue to fail in the face of a fickle consumer base drowning in too many choices, 25 years from now, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee list will be stocked with artists who ignored the demands of commerce and instead focused on creating lasting, iconoclastic music that was true to no one’s vision other than their own. No one genre has the market cornered on that approach — in 2013, it happened in pop and country and hip-hop as much as it did in rock. But artistically speaking, the only answer is to question everything.